arbiter

Old French arbitre, from Latin arbiter (“a witness, judge, literally one who goes to see”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈɑːbɪtə(ɹ)/

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arbiter (plural arbiters)

1. A person appointed, or chosen, by parties to determine a controversy between them; an arbitrator.
   • 1931, William Bennett Munro, The government of the United States, national, state, and local, page 495

     In order to protect individual liberty there must be an arbiter between the governing powers and the governed.

2. (with of) A person or object having the power of judging and determining, or ordaining, without control; one whose power of deciding and governing is not limited.

   Television and film, not Vogue and similar magazines, are the arbiters of fashion.

3. (electronics) A component in circuitry that allocates scarce resources.

arbiter (third-person singular simple present arbiters, present participle arbitering, simple past and past participle arbitered)

1. (transitive) To act as arbiter.
   • 2003, Jean-Benoit Nadeau, Julie Barlow, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't be Wrong: Why We Love France But Not the French, page 116

     Worse, since there was no institution to arbiter disagreements between Parliament and the government, whenever Parliament voted against the government on the smallest issues, coalitions fragmented, and governments had to be recomposed.

• arbiter in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• arbiter in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.

• rarebit

Possibly connected with ad- and bētō, thus originally meaning "one that goes to something in order to see or hear it".

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /ˈar.bi.ter/, [ˈar.bɪ.tɛr]

arbiter m (genitive arbitrī); second declension

1. witness, spectator, beholder, listener
2. judge, arbitrator
3. master, lord, ruler
4. vocative singular of arbiter

Second declension, nominative singular in -er.

• arbitrium
• arbitror

• arbiter in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• arbiter in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• arbiter in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire Illustré Latin-Français, Hachette
• Carl Meissner; Henry William Auden (1894) Latin Phrase-Book‎, London: Macmillan and Co.
  • (ambiguous) in private; tête-à-tête: remotis arbitris or secreto
    
• arbiter in Harry Thurston Peck, editor (1898) Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, New York: Harper & Brothers
• arbiter in William Smith et al., editor (1890) A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, London: William Wayte. G. E. Marindin